Beyond Linux® From Scratch - Version 7.5

Chapter 6. Editors

Vim-7.4

Introduction to Vim

The Vim package, which is an
abbreviation for VI IMproved, contains a vi clone with extra features as
compared to the original vi.

The default LFS instructions install vim as a part of the base system. If you would
prefer to link vim against
X, you should recompile
vim to enable GUI mode. There is
no need for special instructions since X support is automatically detected.

This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS-7.5
platform.

Vim Dependencies

Recommended

Optional

Installation of Vim

Note

If you recompile Vim to link
against X and your X libraries are not on the root partition,
you will no longer have an editor for use in emergencies. You may
choose to install an additional editor, not link Vim against X, or move the current vim executable to the
/bin directory under a different
name such as vi.

To test the results, issue: make
test. The vim test
suite outputs a lot of binary data to the screen, which can cause
issues with the settings of the current terminal. This can be
resolved by redirecting the output to a log file. Even if one of
the tests fails to produce the file test.out in src/testdir, the remaining tests will still be
executed. If all goes well,the final message in the log file will
be ALL DONE. Note: Some color tests expect to be
executed under the xterm terminal emulator.

Now, as the root user:

make install

By default, Vim's documentation is installed in /usr/share/vim. The following symlink allows the
documentation to be accessed via /usr/share/doc/vim-7.4, making it consistent with
the location of documentation for other packages:

ln -snfv ../vim/vim74/doc /usr/share/doc/vim-7.4

If you wish to update the runtime files, issue the following
command (requires rsync-3.1.0):

Command Explanations

--with-features=huge: This
switch enables all the additional features available in
Vim.

--enable-gui=no: This will prevent
compilation of the GUI. Vim will
still link against X, so that some
features such as the client-server model or the x11-selection
(clipboard) are still available.

--without-x: If you prefer not to link
Vim against X, use this switch.

--enable-perlinterp, --enable-pythoninterp, --enable-tclinterp, --enable-rubyinterp: These options include the
Perl, Python, Tcl, or Ruby interpreters that allow using other
application code in vim scripts.

Configuring Vim

Config Files

/etc/vimrc and ~/.vimrc

Configuration Information

Vim has an integrated spell
checker which you can enable it if you issue the following in a
vim window:

:setlocal spell spelllang=ru

This setting will enable spell checking for the Russian language
for the current session.

By default, Vim only installs
spell files for the English language. If a spell file is not
available for a language, then Vim will call the $VIMRUNTIME/plugin/spellfile.vim plugin and
will try to obtain the *.spl and optionally *.sug from the vim
ftp server, by using the $VIMRUNTIME/plugin/netrwPlugin.vim plugin.